YouTube Offers Wisdom of Crowds as a Video-Editing Tool

As we reported a few weeks ago, YouTube has developed a new analytics feature called Hot Spots to help video creators see, on a second-by-second basis, when they’re losing their audience and when people are especially tuned in. The tool, released today as part of YouTube’s “Insight” dashboard, compares factors like the time into a video when people click away to people’s watching habits on average YouTube videos of the same length. Another way the tool identifies a hot spot is by tracking when people rewind and rewatch a certain portion.

The resulting chart displayed with each of a user’s videos is not at all absolute, but it shows a relative curve of “hotness” over the length of a video. A Google blog post describes the feature as a focus group for video creators, and suggests that they can re-edit their clips to avoid the least popular stuff, or make trailers and highlight reels from the best stuff.

As we mentioned last time we wrote about Hot Spots, video analytics and hosting companies such as Visible Measures and Ooyala also offer such tools. TubeMogul, though it doesn’t host video, is also working on ways to get in-player viewer engagement metrics from embeds and through partnering with video sites.

YouTube also recently added a few other publisher tools, including raising the file-size limit to 1 GB from 100 MB — though publishers are still limited to 10 minutes per clip unless they get special permission from YouTube. Users can also now enter metadata while an upload is processing and upload multiple files from within a browser.